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Expectant mothers who live close to hydraulic fracturing are more likely to give birth to smaller babies, according to a new study published last week in the journal Science Advances.

The study on birth weight and other health indicators paints a different picture than another report conducted by health researcher Susan Mickley and commissioned by industry marketing machine Energy in Depth also published last week.

Mickley’s report says that in the six counties where the most natural gas is produced, state Health Department data shows that infant mortality declined between 2000 and 2015, as did mortality for other state-tracked illnesses including cancer, heart disease and infection.

She collected data from Bradford, Greene, Lycoming, Susquehanna, Tioga and Washington counties that showed, for the most part, mortality from those illnesses declined in step with the rest of the state.

The academics examined all births to Pennsylvania mothers living within 15 kilometers of a hydraulically fractured, or fracked, well.

The journal study, conducted by a trio of health and energy economists, delves into data on morbidity or illness. Mickley’s research, on the other hand, addresses only death rates, so they don’t present an apples-to-apples debate.

However, the two works pull the conversation in two different directions and shed light on a complex matter that scientists still wrangle over.

In Science Advances, the economists write that living within 1 kilometer of an active fracking site increases by 25 percent the probability of low birth weight and a lower infant health index — a combination of birth weight, prematurity and the presence of abnormalities.

The researchers conclude an estimated 29,000 babies, nearly 1 percent of the nation’s roughly 4 million annual births, are born within 1 kilometer of an active fracking site and thus at a greater risk for poor health.

Oil companies have been fracking in Pennsylvania since the 1940s, and there are hundreds of thousands of wells in this state alone, said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineering professor.

The controversy began when drillers dramatically ramped up production with more equipment, water and manpower needed to break open the deep, tightly packed shale formations to free the trapped gas.

Any number of things such as increased noise, light and air pollution, water contamination or the added stress from all of the above could be at fault, he said.

“All of those things are the result, not of fracking, but of shale,” he said. “If they never figured out how to get oil and gas out of shale, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Birth weight data is often used in research as an infant health indicator because it’s readily available.

The economists aspired to address four shortcomings found in other published work, including small sample size; missing additional health indicators beyond birth weight; various distances from the well site; and maternal health by examining sibling pairs who were carried to term without exposure to fracking.

They write that estimates for the last measure, sibling pairs, are imprecise because relatively few exposed siblings had an unexposed brother or sister.

Mickley did not know that the birth weight report was underway when Energy in Depth commissioned her, she said.

She questioned why the economists chose kilometers as their unit of measurement instead of miles. Their data shows a drop in poor-health indicators between kilometers 1 and 2, and she says measuring with miles would have revealed different outcomes.

She also took exception with their lumping all birth data from nine years together rather than tracking changes over time.

“There’s such a variance from the beginning years in number of fracked wells in that area, that you have to question: Why didn’t they do it by year? Why don’t we see trends?” she said. “To me, that would have been much more significant.”

Ingraffea’s own research has rattled the industry and drawn attacks from development advocates, including Energy in Depth.

He is pleased that the organization would commission a health expert to research the issue rather than posting a blog to its website, the group’s preferred message delivery vehicle, he said.

Whether the industry advocate would attempt to discredit more than 1,400 peer-reviewed studies written within the decade, most of which share a single thread, he doubted that.

“This is not junk science. This is not blog science,” he said. “These are peer-reviewed, scientific publications, the vast majority of which make the same conclusions: bad things happen that wouldn’t have happened had you not developed shale. That’s a fact.”

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